1st visit to 2nd Life

My colleagues at Dubai Women’s College have developed an island for the students which I’ll tell you about in more detail in my next blog post. I decided to go and investigate the Dubai Second Life Campus. The first issue I faced was that it was impossible to run SL at work, the band width needed isn’t available - an immediate critical success factor for using SL in college. At home I tried again and got into SL successfully with my SL alias and nasty SL starter clothes. My initial feelings were that the whole place was eerie, full of scantily-clad weirdos and with horrible graphics. The flatness of images and the way things appeared out of nowhere in 2D actually made me feel quite nauseous. Some punky elf girls told me how to get new clothes and how to teleport and I gradually gained confidence. The gateway area to the DWC campus was interesting, with a sitting area, small mosque and information boards:

Unfortunately, I hadn’t yet been granted permission to enter the area itself which is strictly secure to ensure the students’ safety. So I hung around in the gateway area for a while then, attracted by a mosque picture, decided to go and investigate virtual Morocco. A very nice touch in Morocco was the ‘info fez’ which you wear and as you pass things of interest the info fez pops up writing on the screen to give background details.


There were no other people in Morocco and I started to feel lonely so decided to teleport to Hong Kong. Where I was sent was a place called Windchime Gardens which is dedicated to meditation. I loved it and struck up a conversation with the designer who was there at the same time; she showed me how to click onto a floating sphere that made my character start doing Tai Chi and it was very relaxing – I felt relaxed because my online character was doing Tai Chi! Here we are doing Tai Chi:

With prudence, I can see a lot of potential for SL as a learning tool. However, at the moment we can't teleport students directly into safe areas without the risk of them being accosted by strangers. With that in mind, there's no way that I'd use it with my students who have very clear social interaction rules in their culture. In its current form I wouldn't be able to justify its use as a teaching tool for my students. Also band width is a big issue. However, I really like SL, will be hanging out there a lot and would love to use it in future with a different set of students. Also, going to use it to teach myself some new meditation techniques. See you in Windchime Gardens!

Sharjah Googlemap story

Here's my first attempt at a googlemap story. Interesting, relatively simple to set up and I can see a lot of potential for its use in English Language classes.

View Sharjah story by Rachel in a larger map

Twitter Handbook for Teachers

A twittering librarian friend posted this link and I thought it'd be worth reposting here. A twitter handbook for teachers that introduces twitter and suggests learning uses:
http://www.scribd.com/doc/14062777/Twitter-Handbook-for-Teachers

Digital Storytelling

All kinds of elearning events and training sessions have been going on in my workplace lately. The one I've signed up for this week is 'Digital Storytelling Using Google Maps', which is great because it ties in with our emerging technology course so well. I'm excited. To prepare for the session we've been asked to do a bit of homework. Firstly to look at a couple of examples of stories that use googlemaps:
Agnes' story
Isoble's story

Then we have to write our own story, with these basic instructions:
1. Write a story that connects to places on a map of our region.
2. Create a Google Account
3. Create your story as a map in Google

Write your story
This story will move from place to place. You will connect each place with a paragraph. Each paragraph can have a maximum of 50 words.
To help with planning, write your locations and paragraphs in a table. If you want, you may include an image related to the paragraph too.

Hope mine works out - I'll post the link once it's done.

Our class' googlemap

View Emerging Technologies Map in a larger map

Lighthearted warning about Twittering

Click on the picture to watch the cartoon.

Another social networking reflection

Before we move on the next topic, I wanted to share some more of my reflections about using social networking as a tool for teaching and teacher training in the UAE.

As a reflective task, I searched for a group that was used by UAE learners of English to observe how they used the group and maybe also to participate in the discussions. It was surprisingly difficult to find a group based in the UAE. I used a range of search terms: English, learn, college, UAE and so on with few viable results. Those groups that did come up were often inaccessible because the group participants had reverted to using Arabic in order to keep the discussions active; had fallen into inactivity soon after their formation or the discussion boards had been taken over by adverts for companies and services.

Finally I came across http://www.facebook.com/group.php?gid=42452619586#/group.php?gid=42452619586It appears to be run by students from Dubai Men's College and they have done a good job of making the group active. It's a young group, with most of the postings dated 2009. The students have conversations about goals and success and post videos and photos related to their college and career goals. One piece of social networking that has gone on involving a contact outside the UAE is a teacher from Italy enquiring about the possibility of his students meeting HCT students when they visit the UAE this year.

However, I just didn't feel comfortable adding a post to the group. Why was that? On reflection I think there were three main reasons:
1.I don’t want to get involved as a teacher and raise the students’ expectation that I will be replying to posts and then not be able to regularly post later. That would let the group members down in some way.
2. The group seemed to be out of Dubai Men’s College and I teach at Sharjah Womens’ college. I felt that it would be easy for me to say something inappropriate that could reflect badly on myself as an employee of the college system.
3. My profile picture shows my daughter and I feel uncomfortable showing that picture to people who don’t know me.
This experiment has made me reflect deeply about my Facebook use and especially my privacy and accountability. I’ve decided to review my privacy settings and set up a separate account that can be used for professional purposes which has less person information and which will be more culturally appropriate to this part of the world. This will be my professional Facebook account.